It's with great pleasure that I introduce our new blogging platform to you! Please let me know your thoughts.

In this first post on the new platform, I'd like to introduce Cliff Condon, the project manager, who likes to share his thoughts on Forrester blogs and the new functionality with you:

• Everyone’s welcome here.  Forrester analysts use blogs as an input into the research they produce, so having an open, ongoing dialogue with the marketplace is critical. Clients and non-clients can participate – so I encourage you to be part of the conversations on Forrester blogs.

• We still have team blogs focused on role professionals. Our role blogs, such as the CIO blog and the Interactive Marketing blog, are a rollup of all the posts from the analysts serving that specific role professional. By following a role team blog, you can participate in all the conversational threads affecting a role.

• And now we’ve added analyst blogs as well.  If you prefer to engage directly with your favorite analyst, you can. Look on the right-hand rail of the team blog and you’ll see a list of the analyst blogs.  Just click on their name to go to their blog.  Or type their name into “Search”.  An analyst blog is a place for the analyst to get reaction to their ideas and connect with others shaping the marketplace.  You’ll find the blogs to be personal in tone and approach. 

Netbooks are one of the hottest consumer product categories in the consumer technology industry at this moment - at least from an industry perspective. And yesterday, after Apple's iPad announcement, consumer electronics analysts immediately started commenting and sharing their views via blogs, and twitter.

But what I've been missing is the consumer view. Let's take a look at how interested consumers are in small computers like netbooks in general, and how this has changed in the past year.

Note: I realize that the industry may not see the iPad as a netbook but both the netbook and the iPad serve the same consumer need: an easy to carry, multifunctional mobile Internet device. So consumers are likely to compare and contrast them in the product purchase consideration cycle.

What we see is that consumers are mostly interested in netbooks as a second or third PC that they could use while on the go, or that they consider giving one to their children. Netbooks serve a distinct purpose, for more insight please see the report 'Netbooks Are The Third PC Form Factor' by my colleague J.P. Gownder.

This week, Forrester released the 'new and improved' Social Technographics. Over two years ago we introduced Social Technographics, a way to analyze your market's social technology behavior. In these years we've seen that with the rapid pace of technology adoption, the rungs on the ladder have shown steady growth, with some (like Joiners) growing faster than others (like Creators). In these years we have helped clients understand the social media uptake of their customers with data for 13 countries, and for various segments and brands. But, in the past year we did feel we missed out on something: Twitter.

As you can see from the graphic, we added a new rung, "Conversationalists". Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes people who update their social network status to converse (both in Facebook as twitter). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn't much of a conversation.

By now, most of you know my love for infographics. A colleague recently pointed me to this great tool of the world bank: The World Bank Data Visualizer.

It has it all: data for 209 different countries, trending, and customizable axes. This is a great tool for everyone who's doing global research and wants to know more about the countries researched, and how they relate to each other.